John Rea Neill (1877–1943)

The Runaway in Oz was intended as the Oz book for 1943, but John R. Neill died before he finished editing the manuscript or even started doing the illustrations; the publisher opted to forego an Oz book for the year, and the next would not appear until 1946. In 1995, however, Books of Wonder finally published the book with the blessing of Neill's family, edited and illustrated by contemporary Oz superstar Eric Shanower. I opted to read this to my five-year-old son following on from Lucky Bucky as if it was the Oz book for 1943. By the time we got to 1995, I am not so sure he would remember who, say, Jenny Jump was!

In some ways, this is probably the best of John R. Neill's four Oz books. In a comment on the late, lamented Tor.com, editor Eric Shanower says one of the things he did was "[t]ake out whatever made no sense"—in a John R. Neill book this could, of course, be quite a lot, and Runaway certainly has a cohesion lacking in, say, Wonder City or Scalawagons of Oz. It has two clear, parallel plots in the classic Baum/Thompson fashion, one about Scraps running away from the Emerald City and one about Jenny Jump, Jack Pumpkinhead, and the Wogglebug trying to find her. Yet it still has that John R. Neill fancifulness, with details such as the Wogglebug literally creating a castle in the air while he dreams—one he intends to use to take a vacation!

The best part of the book is probably the beginning, where Scraps antagonizes in turn Jellia Jamb, the Tin Woodman, and Jenny Jump. Convinced everyone is "mean" for simply telling her to behave herself, she resolves to run away. It's a very child-like, very accurate response, and it led to some good moments with my five-year-old, who likes to declare that I am mean whenever I enforce a rule or boundary, no matter how gently I do it. Were Jellia or Jenny being mean to Scraps, I asked? No, he declared. Hmmmm... Will this lesson sink in? Well, I am less sure about that.

You might think, then, that the book would end with Scraps learning to accept some responsibility for her actions, but this only kind of happens. There is a great scene where Scraps returns to the Emerald City, seemingly in prisoners' garb (a sheet, in a callback to Patchwork Girl), but I feel like an author who was not John R. Neill could have pulled things together a bit more strongly. I do like the somewhat Ozzy moral that sometimes it's right to run away, but it does seem to me that Scraps largely gets away without actually learning anything even if she does inadvertently face some consequences.

So the book was lively and focused, but not always totally successful at what it seemed like it was doing, if that makes sense. And while it certainly had a coherence lacking in Wonder City, Wonder City was so manic it almost gets away with its many faults, which isn't quite the case here.

Eric Shanower illustrates, and it's certainly a beautiful edition. Shanower's character designs are clearly influenced by Neill's, but he has a somewhat different style, with a tightness of line that makes the weirdness of what he's drawing seem more real. This being a Neill novel, there's a lot of fanciful imagery, and Shanower does a great job with it; probably my favorite was the army of quinces! The flat people were also pretty great.

I could also detect (so I believe) a bit of fannishness in Shanower's editing. This is the first book to get east and west right since Ruth Plumly Thompson took over, and there's an extended passage of exposition reversing Jenny Jump's "lobotomy" from Wonder City. Actually, I very much enjoyed Shanower's Jenny, particularly all her costume and hairstyle changes. It's a shame Neill's work is still under copyright, because that means Jenny (and Number Nine) haven't been available to other authors, and they're strong characters I'd like to see in other Oz stories. I also like the continuing friendship between Scraps and Jack Pumpkinhead.

Things my son really did not like: the stressful sequence where the air castle disintegrates, Scraps being turned all black by the quinces. But on the whole, he reported enjoying this one. Both of us like the Patchwork Girl a lot, so perhaps we were destined to! Even the three-year-old is into her; whenever we read a chapter at bedtime, he would point to the cover and declare, "Scraps is rainbow. Scraps is rainbow!" A couple weeks later, I asked him if he remembered what color Scraps was and he said "Scraps is rainbow... but she turned black!" So the books are starting to sink in for him as well.… (mere)

In my write-ups of The Wonder City of Oz and Scalawagons of Oz, I argued that John R. Neill was doing something different to what L. Frank Baum and Ruth Plumly Thompson usually did; if we were to use Farah Mendlesohn's categories, Neill's first two books were more akin to immersive fantasies than the usual portal/quest fantasies of an Oz book. His third and (sort of) final Oz novel, however, sees him revert to a classic Oz formula: an American child comes to Oz and needs to journey to the Emerald City. Neill's implementation of this formula probably owes more to Thompson than to Baum; the explanation for the trip is far-fetched even by Oz standards (Lucky Bucky is on a tugboat whose boiler explodes, propelling him through the air all the way to the Nonentic [sic] Ocean) and he gains a faithful animal companion (in this case, a living wooden whale). Shades of Yellow Knight or Speedy, perhaps.

The book starts quite promisingly. Bucky Jones lands on a volcanic island—one that belches out foodstuffs and is inhabited by bakers perennially under siege by pirates looking to steal their pies; that is to say, "pie-rates." The pirates are using the wooden whale Davy Jones as their base of operations, and soon they end up stranded on the island while Bucky ends up on the whale. Bucky wants to go home, and Davy (who assumes the two must be cousins) says their best bet is the journey to the Emerald City and ask Ozma. Davy must travel up and down rivers, over land, and even across the Deadly Desert to make this journey. Davy is a bit dour but faithful, Bucky is eternally optimistic. It's a good pairing and a classic formula.

Unfortunately, it's much like Thompson's work in another way; it's one of those books where nothing very interesting seems to happen on the journey. Bucky and Davy arrive somewhere, they leave, they arrive somewhere, they leave. There is very little actual danger and even less cleverness; the one time you might imagine them having to do something interesting (when an underground river takes them into the Nome Kingdom), they get bailed out by Number Nine (whose been monitoring their progress on the Wizard's tattle-scope) via the Ambassa-door. When they get to the Deadly Desert, Polychrome randomly shows up to use the rainbow to help them across, in a scene ripped straight out of Purple Prince. Indeed, the whole set-up of intriguing characters on an utterly forgettable journey comes is highly reminiscent of that book. By the time my son and I got to the end and looked at Bucky's journey on the Oz Club map, he couldn't remember what the Zerons they met in an early chapter were—and neither could I.

Meanwhile, in the Emerald City, Ozma initiates a very period-appropriate public works project, putting the people of the city to work painting Oz's history on the walls of her palace (or of the city itself, Neill seems to get them confused). The Wizard supplies magic paint, and Jack Pumpkinhead paints such a good picture of Mombi that the picture comes to life and flies off. Later, so do a bunch of other sorcerers and witches from Oz history (these all being original characters) and dozens of paintings of the Wizard. This is fun stuff, but ultimately goes nowhere. Mombi is pretty easily defeated, and even though she hides in Davy Jones, never actually threatens our heroes.

Still, in the usual Neill fashion, one has the sense of Oz as a bizarre place where anything can happen. When Davy Jones reaches the core of the Winkie Country, he finds the rivers abruptly end. This turns out to be because the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman had the Wizard get rid of them, because they were constantly falling in them! (Recalling, it seems, Little Wizard Stories, among others.) Weird things are always happening in Oz, even between books. There are flying bellows-birds, and a country of uncles (including the Uncle Sam, which confused my son, as he's just called Bucky's uncle, and he wanted to know how Bucky's uncle got there). We learn the Tin Woodman has six nieces, who all married tinsmiths; I want to know more about his extended family! We learn that there was a time when Ozma, Glinda, and the Wizard used to hunt witches together (between Dorothy and the Wizard and Road to Oz?), and that a sorcerer named Old Trickolas Om was the worst to ever bedevil them, besides Mombi herself; the exploits of many of these other witches and sorcerers are briefly detailed, and we even learn that many dark magicians inhabit the Winkie wilderness yet, assaulting innocent travelers. Wow. What I like about Neill is that he just goes for it... even when, admittedly, it doesn't make a lot of sense.

(There is some very bad internal continuity in this book; many events simply cannot happen in the sequence described.  At one point, Number Nine sees Davy Jones enter the Nome Kingdom and travels there to intervene. Then he returns to the Emerald City, and the painting of Mombi comes to life, and it takes refuge in Davy around the same time he and Bucky meet the Zerons... which happened before they went to the Nome Kingdom. Time travel? Wonder City received a massive edit... but on the other hand, Lucky Bucky didn't receive one it desperately needed.)

As always, though, my son, to whom I read it aloud, enjoyed it immensely. The sheer exuberance of Neill's Oz is perfect for a five-year-old, and he really liked the ending, where the bakers' volcano is moved to a lake near the Emerald City, and Davy gets a job delivering its wares—plus, the Wizard uses the volcano to send up firework displays at night. Why not?

(I for one would have liked to have known why Bucky abruptly decides he'd rather live in Oz than go home. This book overall is better than Scalawagons for an adult reader... but still not up to much. Certainly reading it aloud is the way to go, though.)… (mere)

Back when I wrote up Neill's first Oz book, I wrote that "the thing I like about more than anything else is that it might be the first Oz book to give us a sense of what it's like to live in Oz." From the author's note at the beginning of his second, one discovers that this was in fact his explicit intention:

Day by day stirring events happen in the Land of OZ which we are compelled to let pass. No one will ever know of them.
     It would be impossible to tell you all that happens in a whole year.
     This book is the record of less than a week.

Basically, strange things are constantly happening in Oz; it's not that the books we get annually are the only significant events, rather, they are but the tip of the iceberg. (This is a handy get out for seeming continuity errors, of course. Why is Ojo an elephant boy now? Why is Jack Pumpkinhead trying to make Scraps into a proper lady? Why is the Scarecrow ruler of the Munchkins? Well, presumably, very exciting adventures occupying the other fifty-one weeks of the year would answer all of these questions.) The people of Oz are constantly going through wacky adventures... and, of course, finding it all immensely fun. Wouldn't you, if you couldn't get hurt and you knew your fairy queen could sort out any real problem with her magic belt? Indeed, Scalawagons kind of provides an answer to a problem that plagued Ruth Plumly Thompson's novels, where Oz was always coming within moment of being conquered by honestly pretty pathetic outside forces. Why shouldn't Ozma let these folks get as far as they can get, when she know ultimately everything will turn out fine? If everyone everyone who's not her gets a chance to stop the villains, they get something to do!

The premise of Scalawagons is that the Wizard invents self-driving cars, which he calls "scalawagons," and sets up a factory to produce them on Carrot Mountain in the Quadling Country with Tik-Tok as superintendent. Unfortunately, a creature called the Bell-Snickle fills them up with flabbergas, making them do all kinds of crazy things and fly away, meaning the cars are no-shows at the party devoted to their reveal. Jenny Jump, the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, and the Sawhorse set out to recover them, but in the meantime the scalawagons have crossed the Deadly Desert and run into the Mifkits, a tribe of strange creatures from outside Oz. (The Mifkits are from Baum's non-Oz novel John Dough and the Cherub, though based on their location and the fact that they can throw their heads, Neill seems to be thinking of the Scoodlers from Road to Oz.)

Like Wonder City, the main sense this book gives is that we should wonder at the weirdness of Oz, for there's little actual danger or stakes. And we do get some fun stuff: the Lollies and their Pops, who are living lollipops; water fairies that can be used to clean floors; a living clock who torments people who are late to work; living medicine bottles that are so desperate to be used they'll break your leg so they can fix it; the Winkie Woods being a place that literally winks on and off; bell-men who are literally men with bells on their head, who fly through the air having lost their home of Boboland (from Rinkitink in Oz, clearly Neill was working from the map this time out); living forests that travel the countryside in search of water.

But though my son always seemed quite engaged (indeed, he rated the book four out of four stars), I found it often tedious and pointless. One feels like Jenny's attempt to find the scalawagons ought to be the spine of whole book, but Neill must have run out of ideas because she catches up to them about halfway through and bringing the wayward machines back home is remarkably easy. From there, a bunch of random small encounters pad out the book, such as a stray Mifkit (Scoodler?) popping up in Oz and being given gainful employment, and the return of the Bell-Snickle and its doomed attempt to capture the Emerald City of Oz with an army of trees. Two different chapters are made up of nothing more than the Sawhorse running dangerously fast for no real reason; at one point, the Tin Woodman freezes up and can't be saved because there is allegedly no oil in the whole Emerald City. A bunch of animals go on a rampage for the second book in a row.

The characters, especially in the second half of the book, keep telling each other how much fun they're having, Neill presumably hoping this will trick the reader into thinking they're having fun. As I alluded to above, Ozma doesn't intervene to stop the Bell-Snickle from attacking the Emerald City so that Dorothy, Trot, Betsy, Jellia, and Jenny can try to stop it... but they don't actually do anything, they just follow it around in their scalawagons.

And though Neill draws, as usual, some delightful images (the Soldier with the Green Whiskers holding the detached head of the Mifkit by the tongue was my favorite), I felt like there were fewer of them than in Wonder City. Altogether, the book is maybe a tad more coherent than Wonder City... which is probably to its detriment, as it was impossible to be bored reading Wonder City, but I was fairly often bored here.

But, like I said, my five-year-old son seemed to enjoy it throughout, so I guess Neill knew his target demographic. The only thing he didn't like was the Bell-Snickle's assault on the scalawagon factory. And, you know, I continue to be appreciative that Neill remembers many of Baum's characters that Thompson clearly forgot about, like Em and Henry, the Sawhorse, and Tik-Tok, while keeping hers in play too (Captain Salt and Sir Hokus both get a few good lines).… (mere)

After Ruth Plumly Thompson made her (sort of) last contribution to the Oz series with Ozoplaning with the Wizard of Oz, publisher Reilly & Lee invited longtime illustrator John R. Neill to write the Oz book for 1940 himself. At that point, rel="nofollow" target="_top">he had been illustrating Oz for thirty-six years—surely there was no one else more qualified?

Well, the resulting book has a pretty terrible reputation. Everyone out there seems to dislike it; when I recently found the list of Oz books I had read as of 1997, I learned I had rated it the lowest of the Famous Forty. Even Reilly & Lee infamously disliked it, as upon receiving the manuscript, they tasked an editor to basically rewrite the whole thing. Eric Shanower informs us, "You have to read to at least chapter six of the published book before you reach a sentence that JRN actually wrote." As he admits, "Not that JRN’s original manuscript is any great shakes. It displays all the reason[s] that the editors at Reilly & Lee thought it needed an overhaul. However, I’m not sure it needed THIS overhaul."

But, perhaps this book more than any other shows the benefit of reading the Oz books aloud a chapter or two at a time to a five-year-old. Because when you do this, The Wonder City of Oz is hugely enjoyable!

The protagonist of Wonder City is Jenny Jump, a sixteen-year-old (I think) girl who lives by herself in New Jersey. She catches a leprechaun stealing her pepper cheese and transfixes him with her glare, which means he has to grant her a wish. She wishes to be turned into a fairy, but halfway through the process she blinks, meaning she's only half fairy (one fairy foot, one fairy eye, eight fairy fingers, and so on). When she stamps her fairy foot, she's propelled through the air to Oz, crashing down in the middle of Ozma's birthday parade. Soon, she's running a style shop and running in an "ozlection" to replace Ozma as ruler of Oz and helping fend off an invasion of shoe-eating sinister sponges from the Deadly Desert and going on an expedition to a chocolate star in an ozoplane with Jack Pumpkinhead and Scraps and much more.

Neill's Oz (or maybe his editor's Oz, but let's just say Neill's) is a weird, madcap place. If you're not careful, you can sew your mouth shut with magic thread; when you cry, your tears are candy; if you throw your cap into the air but forget to let go, you'll go up into the air with it; you might meet a voice that has lost his man; houses are alive enough to pick residents and battle each other and defend themselves from attack; you can train shoes to perform music; it's a legitimate worry that if someone wins an election in a landslide, the landslide could be strong enough to destroy a city. Though substantially more madcap, it does remind me a bit of the way things were back in the first book, before Baum had codified the rules of Oz so much and a Scarecrow could just come to life with no explanation. It's all the kind of thing that might annoy an older reader, but made my five-year-old cackle in delight.

The book technically has an overaching plot in the ozlection, but it's not really the point. It also has one in terms of Jenny's temper coming under control, though that one reads pretty badly to modern readers—first, the Wizard and the leprechaun conspire to de-age Jenny so that she's nicer (and regresses to before she obtained her fairy gifts), and then at the end, the Wizard removes a lot of Jenny's personality traits to make her nicer! The first intervention genuinely upset my son, and the second I edited out. He was also really upset when Jenny lost the ozlection (he really wanted her to beat Ozma!) but that nicely paralleled Jenny's own anger; she goes on a rampage and ends up releasing a bunch of ferocious plant-animals (e.g., tiger-lilies, foxgloves) on the city. I changed it so that seeing the results of her rampage caused Jenny to realize she had to manage her anger more productively—a lesson our five-year-old needs to learn, at least. (Though when I asked him, "do you ever get really angry when things don't go your way?" he claimed not!)

One of the weird things is that the Wizard suddenly has a penchant for disguises in this book; the commenters at the "Book of Common Focus" on Pumperdink point out that this is probably Neill being inspired by the MGM film of the previous year, where Frank Morgan plays several Emerald City characters, all of whom might be the Wizard in disguise. And it does kind of fit with things the Wizard does in Wonderful Wizard, Dorothy and the Wizard, and Little Wizard Stories. Here, he disguises himself as a customer at Jenny's style shop, as a broom man in Ozma's palace, and a doctor; seemingly, this is all to check out Number Nine, Jenny's Munchkin assistant who, by the time of the next book, is the Wizard's own assistant. That said, it comes across as a weird obsession; at one point he apologizes for not having enough time to put on a disguise, and when General Jinjur recognizes him, he teleports her back to her farm so she can't give him away.

Speaking of Jinjur, one of the delights of the book is that Neill (or his editor) seems to have remembered a lot of characters that Thompson either forgot about or abandoned. Jinjur has only a brief appearance but it's her first one since Tin Woodman, I think. We get dialogue for Uncle Henry and Aunt Em for the first time since Baum died. The Guardian of the Gates and the Wogglebug get a few meaningful scenes. We even get a pair of excellent scenes for Sir Hokus, Neill totally ignoring (wisely in my opinion) the really boring fate to which Thompson sentenced him in Yellow Knight. Here, he is just having fun chasing a two-headed dragon around the Emerald City, but he and the dragon pause their game to help Number Nine rid Jenny's style shop of an infestation of Nomes.

Of course, Neill always draws great pictures, but these are his best since the color plates were dropped, in my opinion. Clearly he starts from the pictures and then works out story events to justify them—and what better way could there be for him to work? How else would we ever get a two-page spread of Jack Pumpkinhead as conductor to a choir of shoes? I don't care how flimsy the justification is if I get to see pictures like this.

It's a wacky book, but probably the thing I like about more than anything else is that it might be the first Oz book to give us a sense of what it's like to live in Oz. Jenny travels to Oz, but beyond that, she doesn't do the usual Oz thing of questing somewhere. The whole book is set in or near the Emerald City, and just highlights the crazy, bizarre things that seemingly happen there on a daily basis. Life in Oz is a constant parade of delightful strangeness.… (mere)